All these 4 dysfunctions eventually lead to the final dysfunction, the inattention to results. When a team is doesn’t trust themselves and are afraid to have an argument, it leads to non-committal decisions being taken leading to no accountability at all and each team member works towards his own personal results instead of the team’s results.

Any team should set the goals and objectives they want to achieve. But if there is no accountability, the members would start working towards their personal goals or their own team’s goals.

Team level goals

Say the overall company’s goals are to have 100 paying customers by end of year, each team needs to commit to it. If let’s say the sales team thinks it is a huge target, they would start working on accounts which are smaller, but easier to close.

Getting 100 clients who are ready to pay a few tens of thousands is different from getting 100 clients who pay hundred thousands of dollars. The first might be easy, but it doesn’t add any significant increase to the top line.

Personal Goals

If the intra-team goals aren’t achievable, then individual members would start working towards their personal goal. With the sales team example, each sales person would start getting clients who yield the highest commissions. This kind of behaviour is detrimental to the growth of the team and the company.

How to overcome this dysfunction

The simplest way to overcome this dysfunction is to publicly declare the results that they need to be achieve. Public proclamations in a team setting tend to allow the team to work passionately towards the goal.

Another way is to announce results based rewards. Link the compensation of the team member based on the results he achieved. But make sure that the goals are clearly mentioned and tracked. Have an objective way to track the goals and the results achieved.

Conclusion

Whatever I have written in these 5 posts are just a very brief gist of the book. Be sure to read the book and really understand with the story and examples of how to save your team from these dysfunctions.

When a team doesn’t trust the members and hide their weaknesses and mistakes, it would lead to the fear of Conflict. The members wouldn’t want to argue and have a healthy discussion. This would lead to a lack of commitment from each member. There will be a few team members who wouldn’t buy-in to the team decision. This leads to the fourth dysfunction – Avoidance of Accountability.

Even if a single team member doesn’t agree with the team’s decision and doesn’t want to commit, he would feel like he isn’t involved in the process. If anything screws up he would just claim “I didn’t agree to this at all. Don’t ask me.” or “I aired my opinion on this before itself, I knew it would fail.” This kind of behaviour ends up hurting the team.

Each team member needs to understand that everyone in the team is involved in the decision and is held accountable for anything that might happen. The members need to own the decision and the product/company. They need to hold each other to a higher standard and constantly drive each other to perform better to reach the end goal.

Whenever one team member shrugs off his responsibilities, the others need to point it out and make him realise that his behaviour is causing failure in the quality of work others do. The team needs to self-regulate each other.

How to identify your team has this dysfunction

It is easy to identify this as each member would wash off their hands on any difficult situation. They become a mediocre team and have a lower standard for performance. This causes deadlines to be missed and ends up with missing all the goals.

How to overcome this dysfunction

There are easy ways to overcome this dysfunction. Whenever there is a group meeting to decide something, make sure you listen to everyone’s arguments and accept their point of view. At the end of the meeting, once everyone has committed to the decisions, make a clear list of goals and standards that was decided. List them out on a paper and email it to everyone in the team.

It is up to the team leader to translate these goals to clear objectives for his subordinates. By making sure everything is recorded accurately, it would avoid any kind of ambiguity.

There should be simple and regular progress reviews. Team members should be given constant feedback on how they are performing regularly. List down the stated goals and objectives and mark against them how each team member is performing.

Finally, the team leader or CEO needs to bring about this culture of accountability by creating a disciplined environment. Whenever a team member does something against the standards set, make sure others point it out. If no one speaks it out the team leader needs to speak out.

By having this kind of culture, the team eventually learns to keep everyone at a higher standard and hold each other accountable for all the decisions that they take.

This week I am writing about the book Five Dysfunctions of a Team which is about a fictional company whose executive team is highly dysfunctional and how the new CEO brings them all together to create a better company. Last two days were about the first two dysfunctions: Absence of Trust and Fear of Conflict.

I was explaining how when the team members don’t trust each other to not use their mistakes and weaknesses against each other, they will be afraid to argue and have open conflicts. When the team is afraid of facing conflicts, there won’t be a clear commitment from each team members.

Any decision that needs to be taken will have few members who don’t publicly air their opinion. This discontentment would lead to the entire team leaving the meeting without reaching a consensus.

To get a commitment from all the team members, two things are needed

Clarity

Buy-in

Great teams always leave a meeting with a clarity of the decision that was taken and also with the knowledge that every member had the buy-in. No single team member is harbouring doubts and disbeliefs about the decisions.

Note that there is no need for a consensus or certainty in reaching a commitment. No team can get both. There will always be one or two team members who will not completely believe in the decision, but the team needs to give a valid space to air their concerns. The team also needs to accept the concerns and move forward taking into account each person’s views.

Also, no one can be certain that the decision you take today will be the best decision. Things always change, the business landscape might cause a different outcome. Competition might get better funding. But you have gotta take a decision “today” with all the possible information available as of now. You can’t keep pushing away and not reach a commitment.

How to overcome this dysfunction

There are very specific steps to overcome this dysfunction. One of the important steps every team needs to do is to reach a decision with a deadline. They have to decide by when they need to commit and stick to it.

And once everyone buys into the decision, they need to cascade the information down to the next levels. If the executive team decides that they are going increase number of customers by 100, this information needs to percolate down to the next levels. Each employee in sales, marketing, tech needs to understand the goal and start working towards it.

Always think about contingency and worst-case scenarios for each decision. This would help mitigate the risk and fear of failure. And instead of doing time-consuming research and studies, start discussing with each other with as little research as possible. Only during the discussion among the team members, various viewpoints will be exposed and it will lead to a better decision.

Tomorrow we will see how not having a fully committed team would lead to our fourth dysfunction – lack of accountability.

In yesterday’s post, I was explaining about the latest book that I was finished reading: Five Dysfunctions of a team and the first dysfunction – the absence of trust. If you didn’t read it, go read yesterday’s post and come back.

Continuing from where I left, when a team doesn’t trust each other, it would lead to the second dysfunction – Fear of Conflict. Any good relationship if it needs to last over time and grow continuously, needs to have conflicts. Whether it is a marriage, friends, business or in a team there need to be open conflicts.

But people try to avoid conflict, especially at work as it is many times considered negative and unproductive. Petty interpersonal politics is different from productive ideological conflicts.

The goal of having a conflict and teams intensely and passionately arguing is to produce the best possible solution for the problem. Many times having an open argument about the problems and issues at hand lead to resolving them quickly and completely. And since the team members know that there is nothing personal about the conflict, they don’t hurt each other’s feelings.

Only when the team members do not openly debate or argue on important ideas/decisions, it turns to back-channel gossip and personal attacks. This kind of behaviour is more toxic than having a healthy argument in the first place.

So how do you overcome this dysfunction?

The team members have to first understand that conflict is productive and healthy. Each member should be able to air their honest opinion about any issue and others must learn to listen to their opinions openly.

Once the first dysfunction (Absence of trust) is removed, each team member would realise that any opinion they hear is not a personal attack, but instead about the actual issue they are discussing.

When people start trusting each other that they won’t use their mistakes and weaknesses, they will have better arguments and openness in their conflicts.

Often times the arguments become heated and might become messy, but as long as the members understand the true goal of the argument, they will come to a good resolution.

How this causes the third dysfunction

Only when a team has a good and healthy argument about the decisions it takes, each member would begin asking about other’s perspectives and opinions. Unless everyone’s opinions are heard and discussed, it would be difficult to get a buy-in from the entire team. Which leads to our third dysfunction: Lack of Commitment. Wait for tomorrow’s post to learn about this dysfunction.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a book I started reading recently and I think is one book that everyone who is working together with a team needs to read. This book describes the many pitfalls that almost all teams in the world face.

It starts out with a story about a fictional tech company in Silicon Valley and a new CEO comes in and finds how the executive team is highly dysfunctional. She takes them to a retreat and explains them about the 5 dysfunctions and works with them over the next few months to get the team to function together.

When you read the stories you would feel like you could relate to each character in the book with someone you would’ve worked with or currently working with. But the author clarifies that he sees the similar pattern in any company or team that he has worked with. He explains how to fix the five dysfunctions and make the team work together towards the common goal.

Five Dysfunctions

Absence of trust

Fear of conflict

Lack of commitment

Avoidance of accountability

Inattention to results

Each of the dysfunction will build up to the next level and cause a totally dysfunctional team which is full of ego, politics and selfish people.

A team which doesn’t have any trust in themselves, would not have any conflicts. Team members would be afraid to air their conflicting views during meetings and would not have 100% commitment towards any decisions taken. And since there is no commitment, there is a lack of accountability.

The Team members will just say, “I knew it was going to fail.” and pass the blame on others. And this causes each team member to work only for himself and his group and wouldn’t care much about the whole team or organization’s growth.

This is how each dysfunction causes a major rift in the teams and end up causing irreparable damage to the organization. In this post and the next 4 posts, I will be talking in detail about the 5 dysfunctions and how you (as a team leader) should help your team overcome it.

Absence of trust

This is the first dysfunction – absence of trust among team members. Which is caused by their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Only if the team members are genuinely open with each other about their weaknesses and mistakes can build the trust.

This is called vulnerability-based trust, which is completely different from the other “I trust him to finish his work by this week” kind of trust. Only when the team has this kind of trust, they will feel comfortable around one another. Else they will have their shields up always on the defence.

If all your time and energy is spent trying to protect yourself from your team members, you can never focus on your job. Only when you stop worrying about your weaknesses and trust that your team won’t use them against you, you will be able to start concentrating on your strengths and use them for your team.

Also, they will hesitate to ask/provide help and feedback to others. They even doubt the intention of others who try to help them and fail to recognize other’s skills and experiences.

When there is trust

When the team has trust, they will openly admit their weaknesses and mistakes and help each other in solving their problems. Always gives the benefit of doubt before reaching a negative conclusion. Apologize for any screwups without any hesitation and don’t have any ego.

But most importantly they focus all their time and energy on solving important issues instead of petty office politics.

Building vulnerability based trust

This kind of trust is very hard to build, as we have been trained from an early age to be competitive to be a successful person. Also, it is our natural instincts to not open up to everyone and protect ourselves in such a competitive space.

The team leader needs to conduct various exercises to help each team member to open up to each other. Each team member needs to start by sharing something personal about themselves. This shows everyone that there is just another human behind one another and builds empathy with each other.

The second exercise is for the team to identify one important contribution of each team member and one area they need to improve upon. Yes, this exercise is a bit dangerous as it might cause some tension, but the feedback needs to be taken constructively.

The third exercise is to use a personality profiling tool like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to identify each team member’s personality types. And the most riskier exercise is to start giving 360-degree feedback about one another. But there is a slight difference between usual 360-degree feedbacks. You should not tie this to any kind of compensation or performance evaluation. You should try to use this as a developmental tool to identify the strengths and weaknesses.

With all these exercises the leader can build a team which trusts each other.

In tomorrow’s post, I will explain about the second dysfunction – Fear of conflict and how a team which doesn’t trust each other fears to have open conflicts.

I am Srinivasan Rangarajan, (AKA) cnu. I love talking about Technology, Startups, Product Design, Marketing and related stuff. I have helped many startups build and scale their SaaS products to millions of users. Currently I head the Engineering Team at Mad Street Den.